Saturday, December 29, 2012

Overcoming the Rejection-Aggression Effect

BIG DISCLAIMER: the theory about to be discussed is by no means
representative of all people or all situations. Many people respond to
rejection by withdrawing or even placating the rejecter. That said, we can
continue.

The Rejection-Aggression Effect suggests that many, indeed
possibly most, people respond to rejection by varying manners of aggression.
This aggression can be overt or covert, active or passive, and generally a mix
of both.

What this understanding does for us is it helps us validate our fear when we do feel rejected. Knowing
that anger is the likely result of having been rejected, we can explore our
fear, and when we do such a thing openly in the sight of God, the Holy Spirit
reveals to us how we might more effectively handle rejection. And resist anger.

The
Gargantuan Negative Power In Rejection

William James (1890) was among the first to suggest that
rejection in the course of everyday life may precipitate rage:

“If no one
turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did,
but if every person we met ‘cut us dead,’ and acted as if we were non-existing
things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from
which the cruellest bodily torture would be a relief.”

This Rejection-Aggression Effect is so powerful it works in us
at an unconscious level. We can very well see, now, how the most pathological
of people—those given to having committed the darkest of crimes—have almost
certainly been rejected to the level William James suggests.

How could this not cause empathy to well up within our hearts
for these?

How can we judge people for their anger, when a great deal of
the time their anger may be constructed out of the seedbed of rejection?

What
We Can Glean Personally

Having now had a foretaste of what life might be like for those
who have never been loved—those who know nothing else but anger—we must now
turn to our own anger, for we too have been rejected.

Could it be that God is issuing us a challenge upon knowing this
effect?

Suddenly as we recognise our own angry reactions, and the
rejections behind them, we experience God’s grace and peace as he lightens our
spirit. We are not bad people for getting angry when we got angry because we
were hurt. We see anger in a new light, and we are challenged, now, to deal
with our anger in different ways.

When we are rejected, we are to see within ourselves the
capacity for a Jesus-response. Instead of anger we can virulently forgive. We
can do this because we can understand the motive behind another person’s
rejection—it’s their fear talking!

Behind most anger, in the dungeons of the soul, is fear.

As we learn to train ourselves to love and not fear, under the
Spirit’s guidance, we begin to respond differently to rejection. Whenever we
are rejected we offer compassion, to ourselves via the Spirit of God, and to
the other who as rejected us. Forgiveness is made easier.